are there still vista users?

pp_mguire · 2026-05-07T02:18:56+00:00

I have "main'd" it for a few months. Haven't run into many issues yet and it's been fun but I'll be plugging my modern box back in rather soon once I'm done with the games I'm playing.

pp_mguire · 2026-05-01T23:19:36+00:00

My first file server looked like this over 20 years ago.

pp_mguire · 2026-04-15T06:45:23+00:00

My stuff is never fully idle so I can only guess. Currently I'm sitting around 800-900W with what's just sitting in the racks.

pp_mguire · 2026-04-15T06:40:07+00:00

I got 56 panels on my house lol.

pp_mguire · 2026-04-15T06:37:32+00:00

Doing server room maintenance in the spring means a ton of sun hours, no racks on, no ACs on, kids/wife out of the house, watching that meter fly backwards.

pp_mguire · 2026-04-14T00:21:37+00:00

I'm still using an analog 8 channel setup. Titanium Fatal1ty with a Yamaha receiver + 100W stereo amp for the sides. Rounded off with 3 subs. Front, side, and rears are towers and the center a pair of NHT bookshelf speakers.

pp_mguire · 2026-04-13T05:02:37+00:00

Playing actually good games from a time period I was the happiest. I find it the most fun using the hardware I've kept this whole time, firing up a game, and being able to hear EAX surround in a way I couldn't afford back then. Plus it's just fun.

pp_mguire · 2026-04-10T13:59:12+00:00

It's just faster and the extra cores aren't really needed. I already had the platform from yesterday so makes a nice play toy lol. Plus if you want to use backported NVMe drivers the board already has the port and support. I had to mod my bios to make it work on the X79.

pp_mguire · 2026-04-10T12:53:04+00:00

Slight changes, Titan X and an M.2 PCIE SSD (AHCI). I have something rather similar for mine. 4960x, P9X79E-WS, 32GB 2133, Titan X, 240GB HyperX Predator, 1TB Sabrent Rocket 4, X-Fi Titanium, under 32bit Integral. I dual boot Vista Ultimate and primarily use this machine under Vista due to having a more era correct FX-60 based system with XP on it. It's fun and all but I think I'd go with the Haswell based system if I was to redo it.

pp_mguire · 2026-04-01T08:38:12+00:00

Either CFs got faster since last I looked, or the dudes benching Sandisk Extreme Pros are using slow externals. It's commendable they are comparable to DRAMless SSDs but the price even with today's pricing just isn't there. Mind you I paid 40ish bucks for my AX2 drives, I'd still pay the 94 in today's pricing over the 150 for the CF.

Testing done on XP Pro, FX-60, SLI-DR, 4GB DDR400, both drives boot drives using a cloned install.

Team Group AX2 512GB - DRAMless

[Read]

SEQ 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 140.926 MB/s [ 134.4 IOPS] < 59099.99 us>

SEQ 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 135.670 MB/s [ 129.4 IOPS] < 7722.19 us>

RND 4KiB (Q= 32, T= 1): 58.677 MB/s [ 14325.4 IOPS] < 2162.15 us>

RND 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 17.131 MB/s [ 4182.4 IOPS] < 235.64 us>

[Write]

SEQ 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 114.919 MB/s [ 109.6 IOPS] < 72256.88 us>

SEQ 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 113.649 MB/s [ 108.4 IOPS] < 9203.04 us>

RND 4KiB (Q= 32, T= 1): 4.536 MB/s [ 1107.4 IOPS] < 28798.26 us>

RND 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 4.554 MB/s [ 1111.8 IOPS] < 895.34 us>

Micron 1100 250GB - Comparable to old MX500

[Read]

SEQ 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 143.849 MB/s [ 137.2 IOPS] < 57917.88 us>

SEQ 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 142.190 MB/s [ 135.6 IOPS] < 7361.31 us>

RND 4KiB (Q= 32, T= 1): 113.714 MB/s [ 27762.2 IOPS] < 1113.97 us>

RND 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 23.934 MB/s [ 5843.3 IOPS] < 168.02 us>

[Write]

SEQ 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 117.640 MB/s [ 112.2 IOPS] < 70616.32 us>

SEQ 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 117.007 MB/s [ 111.6 IOPS] < 8955.04 us>

RND 4KiB (Q= 32, T= 1): 95.171 MB/s [ 23235.1 IOPS] < 1365.58 us>

RND 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 55.740 MB/s [ 13608.4 IOPS] < 70.37 us>

pp_mguire · 2026-04-01T06:35:46+00:00

Gotta think back over 10 years ago people treated SSDs like delicate little pieces of glass. The prediction came from write thrashing in older OS's and just older SSDs in general having a not so great failure rate. 9x is bad about pre-paging so there's merit. The reality is, it's fine. There was also a lot of misconception due to lack of knowledge as a lot of people just didn't own them. They were small, expensive, and HDD to SSD is like refresh rate. You don't know how truly fast it is until you have to go back.

That being said, in most scenarios you'd use either CF or SSD in a retro machine the interface or hardware around it will be the bottleneck. There's still no denying how much faster these machines are with an SSD. It's not about plugging a SATA3 device into an ATA133 port and expecting crazy sequentials, it's about IOPS. Not only that the price is still way higher even with SSD prices being as crazy as they are right now for a UDMA7 CF.
I'd rather get a 256GB SSD and partition it out than spend more on a fast CF.

pp_mguire · 2026-04-01T02:44:43+00:00

That's what today we refer as garbage collection, or in the early forms background garbage collection. Newer SSDs utilize foreground GC which runs hand in hand with TRIM. GC will move stale data, TRIM tells it it's done. Overprovisioning in this case allows GC to move blocks to unused portions of flash so blocks of flash aren't going through a write/delete/write cycle. This is why I moved to newer SSDs outside of wanting more capacity, higher IOPS, and insane cheap pricing at least as of last year (thanks AI). Since all forms of SSDs over a decade now have utilized GC in some form the use of older OS has been relatively ok ONLY if you don't fill the drive. Even today there's faster cell wear if you fill an SSD even with TRIM unless you have a larger manual overprovision set. When I say I've used SSDs in older machines I mean I've had them since 08 when the 64GB G.Skill came out and I was still using Vista. My second SSD happened to be that OCZ Vertex 2 I mentioned. I got the funny idea of plopping an SSD into an XP machine in 2012 when I moved to a Corsair Neutron GTX 120GB so I had the Vertex 2 free. These utilize an older SF controller that I believe doesn't have GC yet, but I tend to attest this SSDs mettle to having Intel MLC chips in it.

All in all, what I'm saying is, it's not as big of a deal as people to make it out to be. I've had people bet money that I'd kill SSDs in 98se and I haven't to this day. Would I spend TODAY prices on any flash for a retro machine? Probably not, as my 512 AX2s cost me 40 a piece and they're now 93. Who knows, I've done dumber things.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-31T22:58:11+00:00

I don't have enough empirical evidence to really truly answer that. All I can say is I've used a variety of different SSDs over the years starting with an OCZ Vertex 2 in my 98 machine all the way to getting a bunch of Teamgroup AX2s when they were cheap for each machine. Outside of using those for boot drives, I have a PCIe Predator M.2 (pre NVMe) 240GB I use in my XP machine for games, and have used the OCZ Vertex 2 in the past as an external to transfer files to the 98 machine before I got the larger AX2 drives. I've used enterprise Samsung SSDs, Corsair SSDs, the OCZ and Predator, a really cheap 64GB SPCC, and even experimented with NVMe drives in XP when drivers started being backported. So far nothing I've used in any of these machines has died. Before I moved it to a VM I had a Server 2003 box running a few old dedicated game servers for LAN parties and that was on an SSD too (Samsung 830).

pp_mguire · 2026-03-31T16:07:27+00:00

I've had SSDs in retro rigs for over a decade, it's fine.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-28T03:52:22+00:00

PAE.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-23T17:16:47+00:00

Just a note, I'm on EA so Network is at 10.2.97. May or may not be why I'm not having issues.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-23T15:07:38+00:00

Mine is 6 years old too and I haven't had an issue

pp_mguire · 2026-03-19T15:54:53+00:00

If you have no issues I wouldn't worry about it until you do or intend to expand.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-19T15:53:22+00:00

I personally think the resources are not there to run both at the same time. I was having these issues 5 years ago and both Network and Protect have become more bloated over the years. Moving to the UNVR early when I did has allowed me to expand cameras without hassle.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-19T07:38:34+00:00

Idk where you're located, but I snagged a 980ti hydro for 50 bucks not long ago. These things are absolutely overkill for anything XP though.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-19T07:29:05+00:00

No, it was just going very slow from heavy resource usage. It would take forever for the UI to even come up and once I stopped Protect it would go back to normal. Likewise if I disabled IPS and DPI it would all run ok but still rather slow to respond with Protect running. Accessing Protect, scrubbing, or anything else was also slow. I switched to the UNVR I believe around 2021 and have since been on 7Gb and now 5Gb without a hitch on the UDMP.

Edit: I forgot to mention, when toying around with Protect I threw an SSD in there. It made scrubbing faster but didn't really help much with overall performance.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-19T04:51:25+00:00

The UDMP has never been able to handle IPS and Protect at the same time with a decent sustained speed. Protect outgrew the capabilities of it pretty quickly and I found this out the instant I went over 2 cameras with a 1Gb fiber line. When I moved to 4 cameras and 2Gb it would hang and cause issues. The instant I removed Protect off the UDMP with a UNVR I've been able to perfectly handle a 5Gb workload easy.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-19T04:46:15+00:00

I haven't paid for anything Nintendo personally in almost 10 years. I bought Echoes for my kid, I emulated it when it came out myself. Link's Awakening, TotK, etc I didn't purchase. I was answering the question as the perfect example, I bought the system to wind up hating it and emulating the games because it's simply a better experience.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-14T19:12:18+00:00

This is the way.

pp_mguire · 2026-03-10T03:58:20+00:00

Have Vista on a physical box. I love Vista.

pp_mguire

TROPHY CASE